Mavis Gallant: Fifty Years of Notebooks

Editors’ Note: The New Yorker’s fiction editor, Deborah Treisman, exchanged e-mails with Steven Barclay, a friend of Mavis Gallant’s and co-editor, with Frances Kiernan, of a forthcoming volume of Gallant’s diaries, to be published in 2013 or 2014 by Alfred A. Knopf. Excerpts from the diaries appear in this week’s issue (and earlier excerpts were published in the magazine in 1968 and in 2001).

Mavis Gallant, who will turn ninety in a few weeks, kept a diary for more than fifty years. You’ve been transcribing her notebooks with the aim of editing and publishing the diaries in book form. Can you tell us a bit about the scope of that project?

The diaries themselves are vast. Handwritten mostly, with a few typed pages, dating from 1952 through 2007—dozens and dozens of notebooks. They represent almost daily entries from a true master of the detail, and in reading these journals I have come to understand that they were a kind of flexing of her writing muscles: practice, perhaps, for the layered and complex observations in her short stories.

How did you first come to know Mavis?

About twenty-five years ago, I was helping run a literary series in San Francisco. I was a huge fan and wanted her to be part of the series. So I invited her and she accepted. She came back a second time, and, in between, I would go to Paris where we’d meet, and we had a number of friends in common as well. I grew up in Paris, and, since Paris features again and again in her work, I was doubly hooked. We stayed friends, over the years—a friendship that began with my admiration for her great work.

Is she able to be involved with the transcribing and editing process?

Yes, most definitely. Mavis has been quite ill in the last three years, and was in hospital for nine months last year. When I visited her there, we’d talk about her work, and I offered to look after her diaries and keep them safe should anything happen to her. She accepted, and we began talking about how she could resume working on them once she got home. I believe that the thought of that was a large part of what got her through the long hospital stay. After she did return home, she asked me to transcribe and edit the diaries, but I knew that it would be an impossible task unless she could participate. So we meet, discuss, review, and she remains very involved in the decisions surrounding the project. We have agreed to focus on a first volume, which will cover from 1952 to 1969. The book will begin where her diaries begin and will chronicle her early days as a writer. (Mavis left Canada in 1950, when she was twenty-eight, and spent the next decade travelling around Europe, before settling in Paris in 1960.)

The selections from her diaries that appear in this week’s issue were written in 1952, when Mavis was twenty-nine and living penuriously in Franco’s Spain. (She gave this time in her life a fictional outing in her 1960 story, “When We Were Nearly Young,” which was also featured on the New Yorker Fiction Podcast.) Has she spoken to you about this period in her life?

Because Mavis is about to turn ninety, the memories that are farthest away in time are often, in fact, the most vivid to her. Her eyesight can give her trouble, so I read passages to her and we discuss them. In some cases, as I was reading aloud lines that she wrote sixty years ago, she would chime in and finish the sentence. This was astonishing for two reasons: first of all, to have that kind of recall (and these journals were kept in a basement storage space, untouched for at least forty years) is remarkable at any age, but, second, the words themselves allowed Mavis to then add details as they came to her. It was through her own writing that she unlocked even more memories from sixty years ago. She’d been telling me for years about those months in Madrid, when she had no money and had to sell her typewriter and her clothes at the national pawn shop. But it was only by reading the journal that I grasped the extent of what she went through and the full story of the unscrupulous agent who kept her money from her.

It’s difficult now to imagine even a struggling writer having to pawn her clothes and family jewelry simply to get enough to eat. Yet in the diaries Mavis seems remarkably unsurprised by what is happening. Is she still sanguine about that?

It’s not unlike conversations I had with my father about his childhood during the Depression. He’d simply say, “It was hard,” or, “That’s the way it was.” When Mavis talked about this time, she’d say, “Yes, I had no money then,” or “Yes, I had to sell my own clothes to have enough to eat.” Reading the details in the journal, I do find her sangfroid extraordinary. But remember what period we are talking about: she was in Madrid during the last year of the Marshall Plan. Europe was trying to rebuild itself. People had very little money in general, and in Madrid under Franco, even less.

Interestingly, the story “When We Were Nearly Young” ends with the protagonist looking at her diary from this period and finding only descriptions of the weather. Obviously that line was pure fiction.

Indeed! Mavis did sometimes reread her diaries after the fact (though these earliest ones were locked away for decades). In other notebooks, there are some very entertaining marginalia, which she would also date, so that you can see she was rereading and commenting on a diary passage ten years after its original entry date.

In the diaries I’ve read, from the fifties and sixties, which will make up the first volume you’re putting together, there is an enormous richness of observation, not only of Mavis’s own life, but of the lives and the cultures around her. Were these diaries a form of journalism in her mind, as well as a place for personal unburdening?

Yes, the journals are extraordinarily rich with detail. They are her account of the last sixty years of life in Europe, the various shifts of populations and cultures after the Second World War and the ways in which Europe re-invented itself in the shadow of that war. They are also extremely personal. Though she is very much in favor of publishing them now, they were never written with that aim, so they are, well, honest and straightforward and sometimes raw, if beautifully written. And something else worth noting: they are written by hand, with no revisions or corrections, as though the words just came out organically in the perfect order. She tried never to go a day without writing. There is a wonderful passage I found from May, 1959. To me, this is, in Mavis’ own words, her writing mantra:

Four or five stories, soft as clouds, changing shape as I watch them. The form of my life—the external form—is nothing compared with the anguish over giving form to these imagined mirrors of life. Must reality become unreal? Record, then, that we took the train and walked in the royal park at Marly, and lay in the uncut grass under a sky as warm as wool and blue as itself. The chestnut trees looked as though nothing could oblige them ever to shed their leaves; and when the wind bent the grass around the barren flat, submissively, the grass went all one color, silvery, like the underside of leaves, as if it might rain.

Photograph of Gallant in 1959, by Alfredo di Molli. Courtesy of Mavis Gallant.

Deborah Treisman is The New Yorker ’s fiction editor and the host of its Fiction Podcast.